Eleanor Farjeon

Eleanor Farjeon (13 February 1881 – 5 June 1965) was an English author of children's stories and plays, poetry, biography, history and satire.

[2] Farjeon, known to the family as "Nellie", was a small, timid child, who had poor eyesight and suffered from ill-health throughout her childhood.

[3] Although she lived much of her life among the literary and theatrical circles of London, much of Farjeon's inspiration came from her childhood and from family holidays.

A holiday in France in 1907 was to inspire her to create a story of a troubadour, later refashioned as the wandering minstrel of her most famous book, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard.

Among her earliest publications is a volume of poems called Pan Worship, published in 1908, and Nursery Rhymes of London Town from 1916.

[4] During World War I, the family moved to Sussex where the landscape, villages and local traditions were to have a profound effect upon her later writing.

Farjeon had a wide range of friends with great literary talent including D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, Robert Frost and Elizabeth Myers.

After Earle's death in 1949, she had a long friendship with the actor Denys Blakelock, who wrote of it in the book Eleanor, Portrait of a Farjeon (1966).

[6][7][8] The inaugural Regina Medal in 1959 from the U.S.-based Catholic Library Association marks her "continued, distinguished contribution to children's literature".

It also includes some music, photographs and correspondence, and two pictograph letters by Nicholas Chevalier, who was a family friend and illustrated many of Benjamin Farjeon's books.

[12] Farjeon's most widely published work is the hymn "Morning has Broken", written in 1931 which in 1971 became an international hit when performed by Cat Stevens, reaching number nine in the UK charts, six on the U.S.

These books, which had their origins in France when Farjeon was inspired to write about a troubadour, are actually set in Sussex and include descriptions of real villages and features such as the chalk cliffs and the Long Man of Wilmington.

Although ostensibly a children's book, the six love stories, which have much the form of Charles Perrault's fairy tales such as Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella, were written not for a child but for a young soldier, Victor Haslam, who had, like Farjeon, been a close friend of Edward Thomas.

Farjeon won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association for that work, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.

Farjeon's grave, St John at Hampstead, London
Verse by Eleanor Farjeon, on a song sheet for children